Introduction
A decade ago, a number of American scholars were engaged in a
debate over whether the United States was going to be able to
retain its hegemonic position in the international system. On
the one side was a common view that the apogee of American leadership
in global affairs was over, and that henceforth the United States
would face a long decline in its power relative to others in world
politics.1 Opposing this so-called "declinist" perspective
were those who were quickly dubbed the "renewalists,"
after the title of an article by Samuel P. Huntington in Foreign
Affairs intended to rebut the view that the United States was
in decline.2 Huntington, and other scholars such as Henry Nau
and Joseph S. Nye Jr, all argued that the declinists had it wrong:
not only was the United States not at all in decline, but no other
state in the international system had the capacity to challenge
the United States for global leadership.3 Indeed, the title of
Nye's 1990 book on American power-Bound to Lead-was intended to
underscore his contention that the United States had all the power
resources that it needed to sustain a leading position in world
politics.

Ten years on, it can be argued
that the renewalists were essentially correct in their forecast.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has not only
not declined. On the contrary, it has grown to the dominant force
in world politics. Who would disagree with Ignacio Ramonet, the
director of Le Monde diplomatique, who in 1998 described the global
position of the United States with only the slightest touch of
hyperbole: "America holds sway over the world as no empire
has ever done before in the entire history of humankind. It dominates
in every sphere: political, economic, military, technological,
and cultural."4 For the United States is indeed alone in
its class. Its dominance, which seemed so fragile to so many in
the late 1980s, seems undisputed today; both the capacity and
the willingness of the government in Washington to shape world
politics in ways that are fundamentally consonant with American
definitions of interest seem untrammeled.

Indeed, the very ascendancy of
American power predicted by the anti-declinist camp ten years
ago has prompted the original renewalist, Samuel P. Huntington,
to examine the nature of American dominance in the contemporary
international system. 5 He argues that the United States, the
lone superpower, is in fact a "lonely superpower," caught
in an international system that is neither unipolar nor multipolar.
Rather, he suggests that the system we are in now is better described
as a "uni-multipolar" system, one that leaves all participants
discontented and seeking change. For that reason, Huntington argues
that the present uni-multipolar system is just a transitional
stage, one that will last a decade or two, a prelude to the evolution
of a more normal multipolar system, where the United States will
become a more normal, more "ordinary," major power.

The purpose of this paper is to
examine Huntington's argument more closely. I suggest that while
Huntington's description of the contemporary system as a "uni-multipolar"
system is not unreasonable, the longer-term implications that
Huntington draws from it cannot be supported. In particular, this
paper will argue that the United States will not-indeed cannot-become
an "ordinary" major power any time soon. While a number
of reasons are adduced for this, the major reason, I suggest,
is that Huntington uses the wrong term to analyze American power.
Rather than seeing the United States as a "superpower,"
a term that came into widespread use in the mid-1940s to describe
the superordinate position of the United States and the Soviet
Union vis-à-vis the other "great powers"-and
all other states in the system-Huntington would do better to embrace
the term often used by the French foreign minister, Hubert Védrine-hyperpuissance,
or hyperpower.6

It is true that the term hyperpower
is often used epithetically and forensically by those opposed
to particular exercises of power by the United States government.
Certainly Védrine tends to invoke it with a bit of a sneer,
no doubt a consequence of what Dominique Moïsi terms France's
"distinct distaste for America's oft-proclaimed sole-superpower
status."7 However, "hyperpower" need not be so
value-loaded; a case can be made for using it as an analytical
category to describe a certain kind of power in world politics.
Thus this paper seeks to outline what the characteristics of a
hyperpower are; how a hyperpower differs from a superpower; and
what implications this has for the future of polarity in world
politics and America's place in the post-Cold War world.

Huntington on the New Polarity
Reflecting on the nature of world politics at the end of the 1990s,
Huntington argued that none of the traditional ways of characterizing
systems of international relations holds true today. The bipolar
structure of the Cold War might have disappeared with the collapse
of the Soviet Union and its alliance, leaving the United States,
in Zbigniew Brzezinski's words, as "the first, last, and
only global superpower."8 In Huntington's view, however,
the disappearance of one of the poles of the bipolar system did
not lead to unipolarity. He argues that the contemporary international
system cannot appropriately be described as unipolar, since that
suggests the existence of one single dominant power and many small
powers, and there are of course a number of "major"
powers in contemporary world politics-Russia, China, Japan, and
the European "majors," together with a number of smaller
but no less important regional powers, such as India, Brazil,
and South Africa. But nor can the system be described as multipolar,
for the gap between the United States and the various major powers
is simply too large. Unlike a true multipolar system, where there
are a number of comparably sized powers, the present system features
a single huge power seeking hegemony over all others; a number
of major powers, which have the desire to resist the hegemonic
impulses of the United States, but neither the strength nor the
desire to challenge the United States directly; and a large number
of small powers. Huntington calls this a "uni-multipolar"
system.

Importantly, however, no one is
content with the present system. As Huntington puts it, none of
the actors is committed to the maintenance of this "strange
hybrid" system, since all of them have other preferences:

The United States would clearly
prefer a unipolar system in which it would be the hegemon... The
major powers, on the other hand, would prefer a multipolar system
in which they could pursue their interests ... without being subject
to constraints, coercion, and pressure by the stronger superpower.
They feel threatened by what they see as the American pursuit
of global hegemony. American officials feel frustrated by their
failure to achieve that hegemony.9

For Huntington, the longer-term
implications of the future dynamics of world politics are clear:
the more that the lone superpower pushes for global hegemony,
the more that the majors will be prone to resist and indeed the
more that they will seek to form a more "normal" multipolar
system of comparably-sized powers. The international system will
thus undergo a secular transformation, moving from the bipolar
system as it was from 1945 to 1990, through a short "unipolar
moment"10 during the Gulf conflict of 1990-91, to a transitional
uni-multipolar system that will last "one or two decades,"
before a proper multipolar system evolves in which the United
States becomes an "ordinary major power." When this
happens, according to Huntington, Americans will find world politics
"less demanding, less contentious, and more rewarding"
than when their country was the world's only superpower.11

From Superpower to Hyperpower
As the foregoing synopsis suggests, Huntington analyzes both the
present international system and its future shape using a standard
division that sees the world of world politics as involving a
range of powers of different size. The world, Huntington implies,
can be arranged as a hierarchy, with the apex being occupied by
those of "superpower" status; "great powers"
are ranked immediately underneath, followed by significant regional
powers-and then the vast majority of middle-sized countries, smaller
powers, and microstates forming the base of the pyramid. This
is by no means an unusual way to characterize international politics,
but it can be argued that the superpower category is no longer
capable of capturing the essential "distance" in power
terms between the one state that at present sits at the apex of
the hierarchy-the United States-and all other political communities
in the international system. On the contrary: it can be argued
that over the ten years after the end of the Cold War the United
States has gone from being a superpower, as it surely was during
the Cold War, to a hyperpower.

But what is a hyperpower? And
how does it differ from a superpower? While the term superpower
first entered the language in the early 1920s, it was not until
the mid-1940s that it entered common parlance to describe the
superordinate position in which both the United States and the
Soviet Union found themselves vis-à-vis all other countries
in the world at the end of the Second World War. While there is
no clear and uncontested definition of superpower, generally this
term was used to signify a political community that occupied a
continental-sized landmass, had a sizable population (relative
at least to other major powers); a superordinate economic capacity
(again, relative to others), including ample indigenous supplies
of food and natural resources; enjoyed a high degree of non-dependence
on international intercourse; and, most importantly, had a well-developed
nuclear capacity (eventually normally defined as second-strike
capability). In short, the term superpower was intimately connected
with the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States
during the Cold War, and was designed to signify the essential
"distance" in power capability terms between those two
countries on the one hand, and all other major powers on the other.

While this quintessentially Cold
War term continues to be widely used in the post-Cold War period
to apply to the United States, it can be argued that it no longer
captures the huge expansion of that "distance" between
the United States and all other countries that has occurred in
the last ten years. The first huge gap appeared as the Soviet
Union's superpower status disintegrated, accelerating the considerable
distance that was already evident in the 1980s: the USSR transmogrified
into Russia and shed not only large areas of territory and population,
but also was forced to grapple with a collapsing economy, a ravaged
ecology, an often dysfunctional polity, and a hugely diminished
military capability. But the distance that had existed between
the United States and all other majors during the Cold War also
expanded in the decade after the end of the Cold War. The countries
of the European Union might together have a population and industrial/economic
capacity equal to that of the United States, and European integration
continued apace through the 1990s, but the EU as a political entity
is no more organized to conduct the statecraft of a great power,
much less a superpower. Despite its highly developed industrial
and economic base, Japan's overall power capabilities relative
to those of the United States are smaller in 1999 than they were
in 1989. China's economy has grown dramatically; its population,
the world's largest, continues to grow; it has more military capability
now than in 1989. But the growth of its power resources over the
post-Cold War period has been more than matched by growth in American
power. Likewise, India has also experienced considerable growth:
it has a middle class that is more sizable than the population
of the United States, and it has successfully demonstrated its
nuclear capability. But like the other major powers, Indian capacities
cannot come close to those of the United States.

It can be argued that this distance
has grown dramatically as a consequence of four factors. First,
the pace of globalization and the integration of the capitalist
political economy in the ten years since 1990 has dramatically
increased the dependence of the majority of governments in the
international system on economic intercourse with the United States,
and in particular secure access to American markets. Only a few
national governments at the end of the century are content to
remain outside the vast realm of economic intercourse dominated
by the United States government itself, or by those in national
governments or international financial institutions who have come
to embrace American-inspired neoliberal ideas about the proper
relationship between states and markets. But countries like Cuba,
Libya, Myanmar, Iraq, or the Serbian rump of the Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia are unusual precisely because so many other governments
are so keen to develop trade and investment relations with the
United States. And it is not at all coincidental that even in
those marginalized countries, the US dollar-the de facto global
currency-is also the currency of choice.

Second, the gap in military capacity
between the United States and any (or all) other countries now
far exceeds any gap that existed during the Cold War. Because
the administrations of both George Bush and Bill Clinton continued
to spend on defence during the 1990s, particularly on research
and development in new weapons systems, the United States government
now has a means of projecting military force on a global basis
that no other country (or group of countries) can even begin to
rival. Not only does the United States retain the massive nuclear
arsenal it developed during the Cold War, but it also remains
the only country in the world with a truly global airlift capability.
Because of quantum improvements in targetting accuracy, mainly
involving GPS (global positioning system) technology, American
forces have the ability to engage in highly precise bombing, as
the 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 clearly
showed.12 Moreover, the defence industrial base in the United
States is unmatched by any other country in size, sophistication,
and complexity. In a similar fashion, the United States dominates
access to space, crucial for both civilian and military missions.

Third, Americans still maintain
a dramatic lead in what Joseph S. Nye Jr calls "soft power."
Unlike the "hard power" resources of the means of military
coercion, "soft power" resources are the means by which
one can co-opt others-the ability, as Nye put it, "to get
others to want what you want." 13 Most assessments of soft
power in the 1990s would lead one to agree with Josef Joffe's
assessment that the United States "is definitely in a class
of its own in the soft-power game."14 Information technology
continues to be dominated by Americans; one simple measure of
this is that virtually all computers in the world run with American-designed
operating systems and with American-written software. Entertainment
and culture of all sorts are increasingly dominated by Americans
or American firms. The language of America is increasingly the
language of the world. And the United States itself remains the
most popular destination for immigration. In short, the cultural
attractiveness of the United States at the end of the 1990s seems
far more robust than it was at the beginning of the decade when
Nye was arguing the importance of the "ability to get others
to want what you want."

The fourth and final factor that
has increased the distance between the United States and all other
states in the international system is the increased willingness
of the United States government to use the prevalence of both
its "soft" and "hard" power resources to get
its way in the world to a degree not seen in the past. To be sure,
the willingness of Americans to remind others that the United
States is not only the most powerful country in the world, but
also is the only one with the willingness to try and achieve ambitious
global objectives, is hardly new. As early as 1945, President
Harry S Truman was declaring that the United States should "take
the lead in running the world in the way that the world ought
to be run."15 This was a theme that would frequently appear
over the course of the Cold War era. Writing in the mid-1960s,
for example, Senator William Fulbright noted the common view of
his fellow Americans that the United States, "as the most
powerful nation in the world, is the only nation equipped to lead
the world in an effort to change the nature of its politics,"16
while the US secretary of state at the time, Dean Rusk, asserted
that "This has become a very small planet. We [Americans]
have to be concerned with all of it-with all of its land, waters,
atmosphere, and surrounding space."17 A decade later, President
Gerald Ford would declare that "America has a unique role
in the world... we have borne successfully a heavy responsibility
for insuring a stable world order."18 James A. Baker III,
Bush's secretary of state, testifying before Congress about the
Gulf crisis, claimed that "We remain the one nation that
has the necessary political, military and economic instruments
at our disposal to catalyze a successful response by the international
community."19 But such statements have to be interpreted
as having been made in a political environment where there were
other countervailing forces willing, even if not always very able,
to cross the United States openly and oppose American interests.

Over the ten years after the end
of the Cold War, we have heard the same sentiments expressed by
Americans. For example, in his second inaugural address, Clinton
asserted that in his view the United States was the world's "indispensable
nation." Likewise, Madeleine K. Albright, Clinton's secretary
of state, claims that "we [Americans] stand tall and hence
see further than other nations."20 The rhetoric may be the
same, but the countervailing forces that existed in the Cold War
era are now almost entirely absent. Only a few governments are
willing to try and oppose the United States on issues that the
government in Washington deems important. On the contrary: they
might make an effort to change the minds of American officials,
but other governments will virtually always choose to fold in
the face of sustained American pressure rather than run the risk
of souring (much less breaking) relations with the United States.
This works with not only in the case of those issues where the
United States government seeks to change the behaviour of other
governments (for example, to abandon legislation deemed harmful
to American interests or to adopt voluntary restraints on exports
of a product to the United States), but also in the case of those
issues where other governments are seeking to change the behaviour
of the United States government (for example, to pay UN arrears
or sign a convention on banning anti-personnel landmines).

The knowledge that so many others
will readily bend to American wishes or demands, or will eventually
abandon their efforts to change American minds, seems to have
given rise to an increased willingness on the part of the United
States government to pursue American interests both aggressively
and unilaterally-defining the rules for itself and deciding which
rules it wants to follow. In short, as Lloyd Axworthy, the Canadian
foreign minister, put it in 1996, the United States was increasingly
acting "without regard to the interests of others."21

And this, I propose, constitutes
the essence of hyperpower. A hyperpower is "hyper" in
two separate, albeit related, senses. First, it is hyper in the
original Greek sense of the prefix: over or above, or superordinate
(as in hypersonic). Thus a hyperpower is one where there is a
considerable and indeed, as I will argue below, an unbridgeable
distance in capacity between it and all others in the international
system. But a hyperpower is also "hyper" in its secondary
and more normative sense of something that is well above the norm,
or excessive (as in hyperactivity): in other words, a hyperpower
uses its superordinate power capacities in a manner well beyond
what others do, seeking almost obsessively to define the behaviour
of others as conflicts of interest, and to ensure that in those
conflicts of interest with others in the international system,
its interests prevail.

The Hyperpower Record
Most analysts of contemporary American statecraft survey the wide
range of conflicts in which the United States is now engaged,
ranging from deadly conflicts with a number of regimes to conflicts
that involve minor irritants with friends and allies. But in all
these conflicts of interest, there is a zealous effort to ensure
that American interests prevail, as this brief sketch of episodes
that span the post-Cold War era suggests:

Crime and Punishment One can point to any number of conflicts
of interest where the United States has sought to ensure that
its interests prevail, if necessary by punishing those engaging
in what the government in Washington considers wrongful behaviour.
In the ten years after 1999, the United States has used force,
unilaterally or in concert with its allies, against a number of
countries. In 1991, force was used against Iraq, to reverse the
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and then to stop Iraqi attacks against
Kurds in northern Iraq and Shi'ite "Marsh Arabs" in
the south and also to secure Iraqi compliance with United Nations
demands for an end to its program of accumulation of weapons of
mass destruction. Force was also used in Somalia in 1992 and 1993
to bring an end to the civil-war induced famine in that country,
and then to intervene in that civil war. Force was used against
Sudan and Iraq in retaliation for the bombing of American embassies
in eastern Africa. And force was used against Serbs, both in Bosnia
in 1995 and in Serbia proper in 1999. In 1997, United States officials
entered Pakistan, unbeknownst to Pakistani authorities, in order
to seize and return to the United States a suspected killer of
two employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. The United States
has engaged in sanctions against an array of countries for engaging
in human rights violations, such as Kenya or Myanmar or China,
or, as in the case of Libya, for resisting American demands that
the perpetrators of the destruction of the PanAm 747 over Lockerbie
in 1988 be released.

Force and Unilateralism Although the United States has frequently
used force to secure its interests, it has tended to do so in
a unilateral manner. Although the Bush administration was probably
the most multilaterally minded administration in modern history,
Bush nonetheless was quite content to impose his strategic decisions
on all the members of the coalition he organized to reverse the
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. As Andrew Cooper, Richard
Higgott, and I have argued elsewhere,22 American "leadership"
in the Gulf conflict often consisted of taking crucial decisions
unilaterally and depending on American dominance to bind the smaller
allies to the United States. Certainly none of the 35 members
of the coalition had any role in deciding to turn the coalition's
mission from a defensive one to an offensive one; they had no
say in deciding when force was to be used against Iraq.

While the war conducted by NATO
against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from March to June
of 1999 tended to have a multilateral face, the United States
routinely insisted on driving the decision about the use of ground
forces. In April, when the Canadian defence minister revealed
that NATO was actively planning in case ground troops were deployed,
he was quickly contradicted by the government in Washington; in
May, when the British prime minister, Tony Blair, plumped for
the use of ground forces, the Clinton administration simply vetoed
the idea.

NATO Issues One could point to both the American
refusal to consider the possibility of appointing a European-and
more particularly, a French candidate-to NATO's Southern command
as an example of unilaterally imposing Washington's will on the
alliance. One could also point to the issue of how NATO expansion
was handled. After the Clinton administration decided to replace
the imaginative Partnership for Peace program with full membership
expansion, there was a furious internal debate on which central
and Eastern European candidates the United States would endorse
for membership. However, once the United States had chosen its
three candidates, the government in Washington simply announced
its decision to its other alliance partners, indicating that no
more, and no fewer, than those three candidates-Poland, the Czech
Republic, and Hungary-would be acceptable. It did not matter that
other members of the alliance had other candidates that they wanted
to push for membership.

United Nations Issues The United States has been keen to press
its interests on UN issues, including the re-appointment of the
secretary-general and UN financing. The Clinton administration
decided that since key Republicans in Congress were opposed to
Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali (engaging in such puerile
behaviour as making fun of his name in public speeches in order
to draw a laugh), it would be useful for domestic political reasons
to oppose his reappointment, even though every other government
in the international system was in favour of renewal. The United
States simply hung tough until all other 185 members of the United
Nations came round to Washington's view and Boutros-Ghali stepped
aside. The United States took a comparably unilateral line on
UN financing, consistently refusing to pay its arrears unless
the United Nations bent to American demands for internal reform.23

International Regulatory Regimes The United States strongly objected to
the flat ban on anti-personnel landmines being proposed by the
international conference. Joining with other mine users and producers,
such as Russia and China, the Clinton administration refused to
sign the draft treaty, which came into effect in March 1999 after
133 states ratified it. The government in Washington took a similar
approach to the proposal for an International Criminal Court.
Objecting to the possibility that the jurisdiction of the new
ICC might apply to Americans, the United States refused to join
with most other liberal-democratic countries, and instead joined
with countries like China, Iraq, and Libya in rejecting the proposal.
And it was the same with an international conference on trade
in genetic foods, or genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The
United States representative simply vetoed the proposal that soya
beans and corn-products which account for 90 per cent of global
trade in GMOs-be included in the discussions, even though many
other governments represented at the conference were expressing
concerns over GMOs.

"Certifying" Other
Countries Each year the
United States government produces a report on human rights observance
in every other country in the international system. A country's
rating affected bilateral relations with the United States. A
process similar to human rights certification was also carried
out in the area of drugs. In seeking to advance its "war
on drugs," the United States government engages in a program
of "certifying" other countries in the western hemisphere,
assessing the degree to which they are complying with American
definitions of anti-drug activities. The United States government
penalized those countries which failed to gain certification by
refusing them access to American funding.

"Rogue" States The United States has never been hesitant
to define certain states in the international system as "rogue"
states, to isolate and punish them, and, more important, to try
to ensure that all others in the international system punished
them also. But the campaigns against Cuba, North Korea, Iraq,
Iran, Libya were all intensified in one way or another over the
course of the 1990s. Some statecraft took the form of extraterritorial
legislation, with two pieces of Congressional legislation dominating
the post-Cold War period-the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity
Act of 1996, sponsored by Sen. Jesse Helms, Republican of North
Carolina, and Rep. Dan Burton, Republican of Illinois; and the
Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996, sponsored by Senator Alfonse
D'Amato, Republican of New York. Both acts sought to impose American
foreign policy goals on all others in the international system
by making it costly for non-Americans to do business with Cuba,
Iran, or Libya.

But some anti-rogue measures adopted
by Washington tended to be on the crude side. For example, when
Clinton invited every states in the western hemisphere to a summit
of the Americas in Miami in 1994, he pointedly refused to invite
Fidel Castro; likewise, when Nelson Mandela, president of South
Africa, visited Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi in Libya, the United States
was not hesitant to openly criticize him.

"Banana Wars" and
Other Trade Disputes Over
the course of the 1990s, the United States imposed a range of
unilateral trade remedies against a large number of its trading
partners for a variety of practices deemed by Americans to be
"unfair." Whether it was sanctioning European Union
for its treatment of bananas imported from the Caribbean and Central
America, or imposing restrictions on Australian lamb, or blocking
the importation of Canadian Durham wheat or softwood lumber, or
insisting that the government of Japan change the way it organizes
the retail industry or how it spends tax revenue-insisting, for
example, that the government spend a specific sums of tax revenues
on public facilities in Japan.24

One small but illustrative example
of the single-mindedness of American efforts to protect their
interests is to be found in Washington's approach to Canadian
cultural policies. For decades the Canadian government has sought
to protect different areas of indigenous culture, mainly by trying
to make it easier for Canadian cultural products to compete with
American culture. In the 1990s, the major effort was directed
at trying to stop American split-run magazines from establishing
themselves in Canada, at first by introducing a discriminatory
tax regime, prompting the United States complained to the World
Trade Organization. When the WTO ruled in favour of the United
States, the Canadian government changed its approach, introducing
a piece of legislation, Bill C-55, that sought to achieve the
same end, but in a way that was supposedly "WTO-proof."
However, the United States government refused to take the Canadian
government to the WTO a second time, but instead threatened to
impose trade sanctions on a range of Canadian products, including
steel, which happened to be one of the primary industries in Hamilton,
the home town of Sheila Copps, the minister responsible for Bill
C-55. The result was that these industries put pressure on the
government in Ottawa, which backed down and negotiated a compromise
that will allow split-run magazines into Canada.

At first blush, the actions of
the United States outlined above might not appear to represent
a great departure from the behaviour of the American government
during the time that the United States was a superpower; after
all, one can readily find numerous Cold War parallels for all
of the behaviour sketched out here. However, I would argue that
what is different in the present context is the excessive attention
paid to the impact that the behaviour of others could have on
American interests, and the excessive efforts to ensure that in
any conflict of interests, no matter how minor, American interests
prevail, particularly when friends and allies are involved. In
the Cold War, by contrast, the United States was much more indulgent,
much more forgiving, and much more careful about its behaviour
towards many others in the international system. A hyperpower,
I have suggested, is a country with both superordinate power and
a deep interest in having its interests prevail over others, large
and small, on both important and unimportant matters-and a concomitant
lack of indulgence. The brief sketches above suggest that in the
post-Cold War era the United States has been taking such an approach
to the protection and advancement of its interests. The range
of American interests to be protected has been catholic, and the
scope of American power projection has been global. And, as a
consequence, one is hardpressed to find examples of where others
in the international system have prevailed over the United States
in conflicts of interest in the post-Cold War era.

Can the United States Become
an "Ordinary" Major Power?
Sketching out the nature of a hyperpower and how it differs from
a superpower is crucial for a consideration of Huntington's argument
about the future of world politics. For central to Huntington's
argument is the idea that the United States will eventually become
an "ordinary" major power, little different than any
of the other major powers in the contemporary international system.
While Huntington's 1998 article in Foreign Affairs does not make
clear how he anticipates that the United States will actually
become ordinary, his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and
the Remaking of World Order, does provide several clues as to
how he believes this transformation will occur. Using a variety
of empirical measurements, Huntington anticipates the possibility
that "the West" will decline over the course of the
21st century (that is, unless "the West" does not take
the appropriate steps suggested by Huntington to halt the decline).25
One could infer from Huntington's reading of world politics as
"civilizational politics" that the United States, as
the "core" country of "the West," will decline
along with the rest of the West as "the Rest"-in other
words, other civilizations26-"rise," and in that way
become an ordinary major power.

However, it can be argued that
three factors mitigate against this eventuality. First, it is
not altogether clear that the structural power enjoyed by the
United States today will be eclipsed or matched any time soon.
Huntington's analysis depends on a particular reading of the tea
leaves: notably, his unit of analysis is the "civilization"
rather than the "nation-state," and as a consequence
the empirical measures of power he reports are highly skewed.
Needless to say, if one chooses to aggregate a number of different
countries together to form a single "civilization,"
one will get a very different picture than if one were to disaggregate
these civilizations into their component nation-states and compare
the structural power of individual nation-states. Second, in order
to be "ordinary," one must think that one is ordinary,
and such a mind-set is unlikely to grip Americans-particularly
American élites-any time soon, particularly given the ethnocentric
lenses through which Americans view the world and their country's
place in it. The third factor is the unique form of government
that Americans have devised for themselves, one that gives them
even more capacity to secure their interests over others in the
international system.

The Longevity of America's
Structural Power The first
and most important impediment in the way of the United States
becoming an "ordinary" power is that it would require
an deeply radical transformation of relative power: either the
United States would have to "fall" to the level of the
other majors, or, conversely, the other majors would have to "rise"
to current American levels of economic, military, or cultural
power. Certainly Huntington has argued that the United States,
along with the rest, is likely to decline (or "fade,"
as he puts it) as other civilizations continue to assert themselves
over the course of the 21st century: "As the West's primacy
erodes, much of its power will simply evaporate and the rest will
be diffused on a regional basis among several major civilizations
and their core states."27 This assertion is supported by
trends in a number of empirical measures-territorial ownership,
population, share of manufacturing output, gross economic product,
and military personnel-that compare the West with other civilizations.
And when the data are organized like this, the trendline is (ominously)
clear: the West is in decline.

But such a conclusion is only
obtainable if all data on power is organized on a civilizational
basis, which involves aggregating the data of numerous countries
on existing national lines. Although Huntington refers to territory
or population "under the political control of civilizations"
or the share of world gross economic product according to "civilization,"
in fact this is a bit of analytical legerdemain. Using a word
like "control" suggests that each "civilization"
has both a political unity and a singularity of purpose and action.
Of course, as Huntington recognizes full well, and indeed acknowledges
elsewhere in his book, none of his civilizations is a unitary
political actor. Instead, whatever territory or population might
be "controlled" by a civilization is more properly under
the "political control" of numerous governments nested
in that putative civilization.

If, by contrast, one were to disaggregate
Huntington's data into the approximately 195 separate units that
comprise the contemporary international system, one would get
a very different picture. As Zbigniew Brzezinski has argued, assessing
the attributes which have given the United States its primacy
would suggest that the United States would tower above all others
on the vast majority of empirically measurable attributes of power-and
numerous other intangible attributes that cannot be so readily
measured, but which are nonetheless important (such as the prevalence
of personal freedom).28

Moreover, it is hard to conceive
of how that towering might be eliminated in the next twenty to
thirty years, either by having the United States "cut down
to size," or by others shooting up to current American standards.
To be sure, one can engage in the scenario-building that is the
stock-in-trade of futurists, military planners, and of course
the legions of structural realists who have, since 1990, been
patiently waiting for Kenneth Waltz's predictions about great-power
rivalry to come true.29 Scenario-builders envisage the possibility
of different (unitary, as opposed to civilizational) challengers
to American global dominance.30 Because the combined population
and economic capacity of the various European states comes closest
to rivalling the key attributes of the United States, the most
popular candidate is a fully united Europe, willing and able to
act as a singular actor in world politics. An increasingly common
candidate is a China grown powerful on stolen American military
secrets and several decades of engagement in the international
political economy; indeed, Huntington even sketches out a scenario
in which China goes to war against the West by the year 2010.31
Others might point to a resurgently nationalist Russia finally
sprung from the mire of economic dysfunction and political disintegration;
or an assertive India, eager to project its power beyond the subcontinent;
or a sub-Saharan Africa unified along Bismarckian lines (with
South Africa playing Prussia and a South African leader playing
Otto von Bismarck enunciating a vision of a united Africa).

But these are surely fanciful
scenarios, built on a set of assumptions that blithely ignore
a number of important reality checks. First, while the power capacity
of a political community may diminish with extreme rapidity, it
generally takes a long period of time for the power capacity of
communities to grow dramatically. Thus, unless the United States
suffers a major catastrophe (and one, moreover, that does not
also affect other major powers), there is only one way that the
relative balance of power capabilities between the United States
and the other major powers extant at the turn of the millennium
will change: very slowly, and over many decades.32 Second, scenarios
that feature the appearance of new unitary actors (a united Europe
or a united sub-Saharan Africa) or posit the rise of such new
actors as "civilizations" ignore the depths to which
nationalism is entrenched in current dominant forms of identity.
While it is popular in some quarters to proclaim the end of the
nation-state and the rise of post-nationalist forms of identity,33
post-nationalism does not seem to characterize accurately the
vast majority of those humans who appear to continue to be deeply
attached to their different nation-states.

In short, while some might argue
that anything is possible, a more reasonable conclusion would
be that the prospects that the United States will face serious
challenges to its structural dominance relative to others are
low, at least for the next generation. For the United States to
"fall" relative to the other majors, it would have to
experience a disaster of the most catastrophic kind that affected
only Americans and their economy-and no others. And, concomitantly,
for the other majors to "rise" relative to the United
States, one (or more) of them would have to undergo a massive
transformation of capacity while the United States remained at
current levels. Absent such a catastrophe, even the most optimistic
assessment of the capacities of the other majors relative to the
United States would lead to the view articulated by Nye a decade
ago: the United States is "bound to lead." For none
of the contenders can match the overwhelming capacity of the United
States in the combined and linked areas of military technology,
scientific research, size and strength of economy, lack of dependence
on external intercourse, attraction of culture, and political
unity.

An Extraordinary Country: The
World According to Americans
A second impediment to the evolution of the United States as an
"ordinary" power is the degree to which Americans, particularly
the foreign policy élite, see the world in such deeply
Americo-centric terms that they cannot conceive of the United
States as anything other than as an "extraordinary"
power. This is a corollary of an idea that is deeply rooted in
American political culture: American exceptionalism,34 the widely-held
belief among Americans, both now and in the past, that the United
States is different from all other countries in the world. The
difference is seen to lie in the origins of the political community
and the revolutionary political experiment put in place by the
colonists and then the Founding Fathers. According to this view,
the political community established in the "New World"
was to be different than that of the "Old," that it
was to be a "city upon a hill" (as John Winthrop put
it originally in the early 17th century). Moreover, these differences
persist down to the present: even after two and a quarter centuries,
the United States is seen as a beacon of difference for peoples
the world over (one excellent measure of which is the number of
people in the rest of the world who want to move to the United
States).

The exceptionalism that is so
evident in contemporary American politics has an international
politics manifestation: world politics is something that cannot
be understood unless the United States is placed at the core.
This is how international politics is widely taught in the United
States, and central to the understanding that most graduates of
American universities appear to take with them into the real world
beyond their university studies.

It is most clearly evident in
the history of the world since 1945 that Americans tell each other,
a history that is undergirded by the "theory" that has
been invented by American scholars to explain American global
leadership-hegemonic stability theory.35 In brief, the theory
posits that at different times in world history, there will be
a country that, because of its superordinate power and its desire
for order, will selflessly apply its energies, its resources,
and its power to the creation and maintenance of a stable world
order. In the recent past, there have only been two hegemonic
powers creating such "hegemonic stability": Britain
in the 19th century, and the United States in the 20th. According
to the theory, the United States created and maintained a stable
international economic and security order; Americans created the
international institutions that shaped the post-1945 order; Americans
created the many alliances that ringed a putatively expansionist
Soviet Union; Americans devoted billions of dollars to providing
security for friends and allies; hundreds of thousands of American
lives were lost in the cause of freedom against German Nazis,
Japanese imperialists, North Korean and Chinese expansionists,
Vietnamese Communists, Lebanese terrorists, Panamanian drug lords,
Iraqi annexationists, and Serbian ethnic cleansers. To maintain
and encourage a more vibrant and open global economy, Americans
created the post-1945 recovery of both Europe and Japan, by donating
billions of dollars in aid and opening its markets to their products,
and working tirelessly to forge an open and liberal trading system
for the benefit of all.

This activity tends to be described
using the discourse of "public goods." In this rendition,
the United States, through foreign policy decisions that result
in the creation of alliances, or rules-based trading regimes,
or stable exchange markets, "produces" public goods,
either for the international system as a whole, or for particular
countries. Moreover, these public goods, by their very nature,
are deemed to be "good" for whomever is out there consuming
them. Consider, for example, Joshua S. Goldstein's globalized
update of the aphorism that "What's good for General Motors
is good for the USA": a hegemon, Goldstein claims, "basically
has the same interests as the common good of all states."36
In other words, "What's good for the USA is good for the
whole world." Americans spend money and energy creating something
positive for the world that can be enjoyed by all, even those
who do not contribute to those "goods," and indeed even
those who might not want to enjoy those goods.

A view of the world grounded in
a "public goods" approach encourages a particular view
of others in the international system as little more than "free
riders"-in other words, those in other countries who enjoy
the security created by the United States, enjoy the economic
benefits of an open and liberal global economy sustained by American
leadership, but who do not have to pay the attendant costs. Little
wonder that Americans raised on the idea that they are providing
"international public goods" to a world that seems ungrateful
should be concerned about the issue of "burden-sharing,"
and how the allies of the United States tend to be able to devote
more of their social wage to social welfare because the American
treasury is burdened with the costs of paying for the various
alliances it leads. This also leads Americans to embrace the idea
of "fair trade," a uniquely American term invented to
describe the process by which trading partners of the United States,
having been assisted by American largesse in the immediate post-1945
period, in essence kick their benefactors in the teeth by engaging
in trade practices that hurt American interests.

Hegemonic stability theory is,
if nothing else, deeply nationalistic. It portrays Americans as
selfless and altruistic, with the rest of the world either as
followers responding to farsighted American leadership and extraordinary
American generosity, or cast in the role of cheap or ungrateful
"free riders." As a nationalist tale, hegemonic stability
theory no doubt achieves a number of national purposes, such as
making Americans feel good about their country's generosity and
proud of its power. Moreover, since no other state in the international
system behaves like this, hegemonic stability theory confirms
the essential rightness of the larger idea of American exceptionalism.
Perhaps this is why it is so popular among Americans. For indeed,
as David P. Calleo has noted, hegemonic stability theory has seized
the American imagination.37 It is widely reflected in American
public discourse; and it is widely taught in the textbooks that
used to introduce American undergraduates to world politics.38
Moreover, as Isabelle Grunberg has demonstrated so cogently, hegemonic
stability theory has a high mythic content that favours its perpetuation.39

But this is very much the story
of world politics as it would be told by an American. Few others
in the international system tell the story this way, not even
those who would willingly grant that many elements of post-1945
American statesmanship, such as the Marshall Plan, represented
statecraft of considerable vision and generosity on the part of
those in the administration and Congress, and indeed on the part
of Americans who sustained the postwar internationalists in power.
On the contrary: non-Americans tend to find it hard to take the
essential hubris of the theory and the fanciful conflation of
the "common good of all states" with the "international
public goods" being "produced" by Americans. It
is thus no coincidence that hegemonic stability theory is a tale
that tends to be told predominantly in the United States.

However, the predominance of this
view of the United States at the centre of world politics has
substantial implications for the future emergence of the United
States as an "ordinary power." Being "ordinary"
implies being able to conceive of the world without your country
at the centre, being able to conceptualize the world of world
politics as a sphere of human activity that does not, need not,
or should not involve one particular extraordinary state. But,
as noted above, this is a view of the world quite alien to Americans,
and, more importantly, the prospects of changing this dominant
American view are slim. Indeed, it could be argued that American
exceptionalism is so deeply rooted in the Weltanschauung of so
many Americans today, and so deeply rooted in the social reproductive
processes that shape the world views of each succeeding generational
cohort of young Americans, that even if structural power conditions
were to change over the next half-century, Americans would still
regard their country as an extraordinary, and never an "ordinary,"
country.

A Unique Governmental System A final factor that suggests the continuation
of American hyperpower is the unique governmental system that
Americans have constructed for themselves. In particular, Americans,
alone in the world, have a legislature which is given huge power
to define the national interests of the United States in ways
that are both deeply parochial and unabashedly imperial.40 The
Helms-Burton legislation is a good example: that piece of imperial
legislation reflects nicely the parochial domestic electoral dynamics
triggered by the Cuban shootdown of two Cessnas operated by the
Brothers to the Rescue in 1996. This is by no means unique: the
policies of the United States towards much of the world are driven
by Congress.

Moreover, American relations with
other countries are also deeply affected by the tendency of some
members of Congress to be remarkably self-indulgent in their behaviour
and their attitudes towards the outside world. Consider the three
incidents cited by William Wallace and Jan Zielonka in their recent
survey of American-European relations.41 In May 1997, Jesse Helms
simply stalked out of a meeting with Robin Cook, the British foreign
secretary, when Cook had the temerity to disagree with Helms on
the issue of allied burden-sharing. In 1998, during the debate
on NATO enlargement, Helms openly denigrated the Europeans on
the floor of the Senate, claiming that "the European Union
could not fight its way out of a wet paper bag." Finally,
Alfonse D'Amato responded to a European ambassador's complaint
that the D'Amato act's extraterritoriality was contrary to international
law by saying: "To hell with international law," and
then threatening the ambassador by saying: "You've got a
choice to make: you're either with us or against us, and I only
hope for your sake that you make the right decision."

Again, the arrogance, rudeness,
and self-indulgence of members of Congress towards the international
system is hardly new: history is littered with examples of such
behaviour.42 Such self-indulgence stems in part from the parochial
nature of the United States Congress, but mostly from the inchoate
appreciation that members of Congress have that loose talk, rudeness,
and arrogance actually carry few costs for the United States.
And they are right: others in the international system will surely
grumble at American arrogance, but in the end they will not do
anything about it. Such is the superordinate power of the United
States that Americans, whether in Congress or in the executive
branch or anywhere else, never have to behave as though others
matter; being a hyperpower means never having to say you are sorry.

Conclusions: Bound to be Hyper?
This paper has argued that we need to rethink the hierarchical
categories we use to describe and analyze power and its exercise
in the post-Cold War era. While we have tended to see American
power in the post-Cold War era in Cold War terms, I have suggested
that the terminology associated with that earlier era no longer
captures the essential changes that have occurred in the international
system. Rather, I argue that the term favoured by Hubert Védrine-hyperpower-has
greater analytical value than the current term of choice, superpower.
The paper sought to provide some explicit indication of what a
hyperpower is and how it differs from a superpower.

And thus armed with this slightly
different analytical perspective, we can make better sense of
Samuel Huntington's argument about the future of the international
system. While Huntington sees the United States as a "lonely
superpower" destined to decline to being one of a number
of "ordinary" major powers in the future, this paper
concludes that, absent a major and devastating catastrophe that
effects only the United States and no one else, we are unlikely
to see Huntington's prediction come to pass. Too much militates
against it: the superordinate power of the United States relative
to all others and the hyperpower dynamic that this creates; the
view that Americans have of themselves and their country as anything
but "ordinary," an exceptionalism that is deeply entrenched
in the processes of social reproduction, notably in the educational
system; and a unique system of government that helps to galvanize
and entrench the aggressive efforts to prevail in conflicts large
and small, the unilateralism that is so deeply part of American
foreign policy, and the arrogance that comes with hyperpower status.
All of these factors suggest that the United States will remain
a hyperpower, and an unapologetic one at that, for many years
to come.

NOTES

1 For example, Paul Kennedy, The
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military
Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988).

3 Henry Nau, The Myth of America's
Decline: Leading the World Economy into the 1990s (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990); Joseph S. Nye, Jr, Bound to Lead: The
Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

12 This is of course not to suggest
that every one of the approximately 23,000 munitions directed
at Yugoslav targets during the eleven weeks of bombing fell precisely
where the NATO targetters intended. Numerous civilians were killed
and a number of non-military targets were destroyed as a consequence
of munitions that were mistargetted, fired in error, or simply
malfunctioned.

13 Nye, Bound to Lead, 31; also
29-35 and 188ff.

14 Josef Joffe, "The secret
of US world domination," The Globe and Mail (Toronto), 27
September 1997.

16 J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance
of Power (New York: Random House, 1966), 256; cited in Waltz,
Theory of International Politics, 201.

17 Cited in Kennedy, Rise and
Fall of the Great Powers, 390; this nicely echoed an observation
of the Canadian ambassador in Washington at the time. Charles
Ritchie noted to his diary in July 1963 that American officials
"are everywhere, into everything-a wedding in Nepal, a strike
in British Guinea, the remotest Greek island, the furthest outport
of Donegal, the banks of the Limpopo. All countries' private and
domestic affairs are of interest to the Americans..." Ritchie,
Storm Signals: More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1962-1971 (Toronto:
Macmillan, 1983), 53.

18 Cited in Crabb, American Foreign
Policy, 53.

19 Quoted in Martin Walker, "The
US and the Persian Gulf crisis," World Policy Journal 7 (Fall
1990), 791.

20 Quoted in Huntington, "Lonely
superpower," 37.

21 See Kim Richard Nossal, "
'Without regard to the interests of others': Canada and American
unilateralism is the post-Cold War era," American Review
of Canadian Studies 27 (Summer 1997), 179-97.

24 See Leonard J. Schoppa, "Two-level
games and bargaining outcomes: why gaiatsu succeeds in Japan in
some cases but not others," International Organization 47
(Summer 1993), 353-86.

25 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash
of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1996), esp. chap. 4, "The fading of the West,"
81-101, and chap. 12, 301-21.

26 In the article out of which
his book grew, Huntington created a simple civilizational dichotomy-"The
West versus the rest": see Huntington, "The clash of
civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer 1993), 39-41.
For critical views, see Fouad Ajami, "The summoning,"
and Kishore Mahbubani, "The dangers of decadence: what the
rest can teach the West," both in Foreign Affairs 72 (September/October
1993), 3-14.

29 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of
International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), argued
that great-power rivalry was an inexorable and necessary feature
of global politics; any disappearance of great-power rivalry was
thus merely a transitional phase between one set of enmities and
another destined to replace it.

32 As Waltz has noted, "Surveying
the rise and fall of nations over the centuries, one can only
conclude that national rankings change slowly. War aside, the
economic and other bases of power change little more rapidly in
one major nation than they do in another. Differences in economic
growth rates are neither large enough nor steady enough to alter
standings except in the long run." Theory of International
Politics, 177.

33 For example, Mary Kaldor, "Cosmopolitanism
versus nationalism: the new divide?" in Richard Caplan and
John Feffer, eds., Europe's New Nationalism: States and Minorities
in Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

34 For an excellent survey of
this phenomenon in American politics, see Byron E. Shafer, ed.,
Is America Different? A New Look at American Exceptionalism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991).

35 Exemplars would include Robert
O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World
Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984);
and Charles P. Kindleberger, "Dominance and leadership in
the international economy: exploitation, public goods and free
riders," International Studies Quarterly 25 (June 1981),
242-54.

37 David P. Calleo, Beyond American
Hegemony: The Future of the Western Alliance (New York: Basic
Books, 1987), 218.

38 For a discussion of the Americo-centric
biases in international relations texts, see Kim Richard Nossal,
"Tales that textbooks tell: ethnocentricity and diversity
in American introductions to international relations," in
in Robert M. Crawford and Darryl S.L. Jarvis, eds., International
Relations: Still an American Social Science? (State University
of New York Press); draft available at http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/
~polisci/faculty/nossal/tales.htm

42 See, for example, the survey
in Kim Richard Nossal, "Congress and Canada," in Robert
A. Pastor and Rafael Fernández de Castro, eds., The Controversial
Pivot: The US Congress and North America (Washington: Brookings
Institution, 1998), 50-69.